Nice Visuals from the Zürich Chamber Orchestra

Definitely good to see some competition in this market. Hopefully, this will improve iTunes and add another nail in DRM’s coffin.

They arrived late today – yesterday technically. Me and a coworker picked them up from the states. 40$ in taxes. It wasn’t until later that the public open source hack was posted.

My coworker tried it first. I was going to wait. He’s braver than me! But ultimately who can resist?

I was surprised when talking to random friends to hear how many of them thought that the price drop was a “desperate” move by Apple to sell their excess inventory of iPhones. My take on it is that it’s an aggressive and totally calculated move to outdo the 1 million units sold benchmark by the end of this year. Apple needs to secure a good chunk of the cell phone market this Christmas to be a credible force next year. This is a good way to do it and it also doesn’t hurt to charge early adopters extra money.

Cringely also has a good take on the gift certificates. I didn’t think about it at first, but it’s quite true that many of the customers that will be getting these gift certificates are not current purchasers of other Apple products. This is a great way to make them buy more stuff and Apple is still going to make a profit on that 100$.

Canada voted against the fast track motion.

It’s hard to describe just how nicely polished the interface is. Everything is animated but not in an overly obnoxious way. Even ignoring the phone features, this is a kick-ass PDA/iPod. The screen is great for watching movies, crisp, bright! Being able to connect to any open wireless, check your email, iCal, Safari, Address Book is amazing. I think those features alone make the product worth having.

It’s definitely going to set the bar higher for other cell phones. And that’s a good thing considering what’s out there right now.

Recently, a bunch of European governments have started complaining about this. Rightfully so!

And, in response, Steve has posted his thoughts on DRM. His position is that Apple cannot realistically open the FairPlay DRM to other vendors without it resulting in leaks in the protection. So, he argues, music should either be protected with proprietary technology by each vendor (like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft do today) or it should just be protection-free, open to everybody.

Personally, an iTunes Store with no DRM would definitely get my business so I’m really glad that these issues are finally being explored by the European governments. Hopefully, with enough pressure, the music labels will remove the DRM requirements to the music they sell online and Apple will follow suit.

One can only hope that all this nonsense will eventually go away!

It’s really interesting! You can try “iMac”, “iBook”, “MacBook” vs “iPod” as well …

Windows purrs on the machine and even Unreal Tournament 2004 (Demo) ran great. I got it at 60fps with most of the settings turned up. For some reason, Unreal didn’t recognize the full resolution 1440×900 and instead only allowed me to go to 1152×864. Windows itself ran at the native resolution with no problems.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of Windows back-switcher. But it’s nice to have around for testing web pages and games!

I bet it will really increase the sales of MacBook Pro …